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New estimates indicate that males are not larger than females in most mammals

View ORCID ProfileKaia J. Tombak, View ORCID ProfileSeverine B. S. W. Hex, View ORCID ProfileDaniel I. Rubenstein
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.23.529628
Kaia J. Tombak
1Department of Anthropology, Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
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  • For correspondence: ktombak@alumni.princeton.edu
Severine B. S. W. Hex
2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
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Daniel I. Rubenstein
2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
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Abstract

Sexual size dimorphism (SSD) has motivated a large body of research on mammalian mating strategies and sexual selection. Despite some contrary evidence, the narrative that larger males are the norm in mammals – upheld since Darwin’s Descent of Man – still dominates today, supported by meta-analyses that use crude measures of dimorphism and taxonomically-biased data. With newly-available datasets and primary sources reporting sex-segregated means and variances in adult body mass, we estimated statistically-determined rates of SSD in mammals, sampling taxa by their species richness at the family level. Our analyses of >400 species indicate that although males tend to be larger than females when dimorphism occurs, males are not larger in most mammals, and suggest a need to revisit other assumptions in sexual selection research.

One-Sentence Summary Taxonomically-balanced estimates of rates of sexual size dimorphism in mammals refute the ‘larger males’ narrative.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 23, 2023.
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New estimates indicate that males are not larger than females in most mammals
Kaia J. Tombak, Severine B. S. W. Hex, Daniel I. Rubenstein
bioRxiv 2023.02.23.529628; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.23.529628
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New estimates indicate that males are not larger than females in most mammals
Kaia J. Tombak, Severine B. S. W. Hex, Daniel I. Rubenstein
bioRxiv 2023.02.23.529628; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.23.529628

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